The Patterning of Obsessive Love in Lolita and Possessed
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Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world 15 | 2017 Lolita at 60 / Staging American Bodies The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed Wilson Orozco Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/11234 DOI: 10.4000/miranda.11234 ISSN: 2108-6559 Publisher Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès Electronic reference Wilson Orozco, “The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed”, Miranda [Online], 15 | 2017, Online since 06 October 2017, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ miranda/11234 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.11234 This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed 1 The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed Wilson Orozco Introduction 1 Nabokov’s work is well known for its complexity and its convoluted plots, something which is particularly true of Lolita, which is rich in patterns, repetitions and mises en abyme. The latter take the form of intertextual relations, references to painting, popular culture or cinema (and, in fact, Nabokov’s relation to the cinema has been the subject of many papers and books). Two films are mentioned in the novel: Possessed and Brute Force. In what follows, a comparison will be made between the former and the novel in terms of the repetition of the obsessive love present in both works. Humbert and Louise are obsessive lovers and their obsessions paradoxically lead them to develop aggressive feelings towards the beloved—to the point of physical violence or at least the phantasy of it. Those obsessions are also a manifestation of their mental instability, something which makes them extremely unreliable narrators in a context of a confession they make, resulting in the text we read or the film we see. While Humbert explains and justifies his acts in his confession, however, Louise is made to talk to a psychiatrist. The purpose of this analysis is to find common patterns in the novel and the film in the terms of obsessive love, hostility towards the beloved, madness, unreliable narration and confession. Patterning in Lolita 2 Authors like Fraysse (2008) and Bouchet (2010), the latter especially in her “analysis of embedded structures and meta-artistic devices in Lolita,” have studied what, thanks to them, now appears evident: the patterns implicit in Nabokov’s work and first pointed out by Appel Jr. (2012). These patterns are, for him, a manifestation of Nabokov’s involuted narrative—apparent in his writing because “[an] involuted work turns in Miranda, 15 | 2017 The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed 2 upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and […] allegorical of itself […]” (Appel 2012, xxiii). Besides: Nabokov’s passion for chess, language, and lepidoptery has inspired the most elaborately involuted patterning in his work. Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and spoonerisms all reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist ; thematically, they are appropriate to the prison of mirrors. (Appel 2012, xxviii) 3 All of the above, that is to say, parody, puns, anagrams and spoonerisms are characteristics of Lolita. It is, therefore, no wonder that reading this novel is a challenging experience. For her part, Bouchet states, with regard to that involution, that Lolita “also provides embedded structures that function as typical mises en abyme” (Bouchet 13), that is, elements which mirror the whole or some part of the novel. Such mises en abyme can also be understood as the work-within-the-work described by Alfred Appel Jr. as the “self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles” (Appel 2012, xxix). Cinema as mise en abyme 4 The use of popular culture, and of film in particular, are examples of the mises en abyme mentioned above. In fact, Lolita could be categorized as a kind of encyclopedia of popular culture in the form of cinema, songs, advertising, etc., making it one of the most surprising and complex works of art of the 20th Century. The presence of cinema in Nabokov’s work is particularly important. It has been analyzed primarily by Appel (1974) and Wyllie (2003, 2005, 2015), the latter offering a specific study of formal filmic devices and the stylistic recreations made by Nabokov’s narrators (2003).1 These motifs could in fact be examples of mises en abyme, repetitions, doubles and mirrors, which, along with confinement, are recurrent in film noir too. 2 Signs of self-reflexivity in Nabokov’s work are, as noted earlier, usually made evident through the use of cinema: This notion of participating in a self-declared and acknowledged piece of creative artifice has since been acknowledged as a key element of the overall cinematic aesthetic, but it was also to become a recurrent theme of Nabokov’s Russian and English fiction. (Wyllie 2003, 14) 5 And as “Nabokov's characters […] take their cinema-going seriously” (Wyllie 2005, 222), we can understand why Humbert and Lolita are such obsessive moviegoers. In the case of Humbert, it enables him to have the chance of stealing Lolita’s affections, and in Lolita’s case, of indulging in her passion, dreaming of someday becoming one of the film stars she sees on the screen, just like Margot in Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov 1989). But, most importantly, cinema in Lolita appears not only at the level of content but also at a formal level: Nabokov's excitement [with film] parallels the fervor with which many of his protagonists pursue their cinematic dreams. This ‘keenness’ also extends to his manipulation of the processes, styles, and techniques of film-making in his fiction, which both generates a thematic context for the preoccupations of his movie- obsessed characters and introduces a new narrative and perceptual dimension that impacts upon fundamental notions of time, memory, mortality, and the imagination. (Wyllie 2005, 217-218) 6 Lolita contains constant references to cinema in the form of movies alluded to without mentioning their titles, something which led to the critics making guesses. Tadashi Miranda, 15 | 2017 The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed 3 Wakashima (n.d.), for example, identified one such film as John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952)—a movie which does not fit the narrative time in Lolita, but which is nonetheless alluded to in Humbert’s once destroyed but rewritten diary: Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner). (Nabokov 2012, 45) 7 There are also allusions to cinema in the movie magazines Lolita reads (Bouchet 5), and comparisons and descriptions in the book are often film-based—for example Charlotte is constantly compared to Marlene Dietrich. So, it is no surprise that with such an emphasis on cinema, the novel attracted an early and very successful film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick (Agirre 15). Explicit Films in Lolita 8 Humbert Humbert, like every good romantic hero (see Manolescu), gives us detailed insights into his thoughts and feelings, whether deriving from a cold landscape or from what he finds in hotels or reads in newspapers. The journeys he makes seem to be a repetition, clearly separated in time. Repetitions, by the way, are abundantly present in Nabokov’s work, particularly in Lolita. As Boyd explains: What enabled Nabokov to explore pattern in time in entirely new ways was the gradual mastery he acquired over the recombination of fictional details. He transmutes a recurrent element sufficiently for the repetition to be overlooked, he casually discloses one piece of partial information and leaves it up to us to connect it with another apparently offhand fact, or he groups together stray details and repeats the random cluster much later in what appears to be a remote context. (Boyd 300) 9 Those repetitions could, for instance, take the form of the journeys Humbert and Lolita made together. Evidently the most painful moment for him is when he loses his Lolita and starts looking for her and Quilty. In this Lolita-less journey, he offers plenty of literary and geographical data, besides news of current events. But he finally gets tired of searching and decides instead to go to The Enchanted Hunters hotel, the place where he was the happiest of men with the nymphet, just to practice what he knows best: remembering. He goes back to that paradigmatic place because a “curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her” (Nabokov 2012, 261). But as Humbert prefers reading to “reality,” he changes his mind and goes to the local library to check the events of that fatal summer when he was in The Enchanted Hunters almost as a fugitive: “Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed…Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres” (Nabokov 2012, 262). This is, to say the least, curious and paradoxical. Of the two hundred-odd films which Humbert claims to have seen with Lolita, only those two titles are actually mentioned, and both of them are in fact real films: Brute Force was directed by Jules Dassin (1947) and Possessed by Curtis Bernhardt (1947).